January's Sustainable Living Tip
You've heard the adage, "Think Globally, Act Locally." But there are a surprising number of global problems that can be solved if more of us paid closer attention to little, local details. Imagine the global impact if everyone adopted the following New Year's resolutions!
New Year Resolutions: Think Locally to Act Globally
- Vote for green electricity. If you are a CMP or Bangor Hydro customer in Maine, you can choose which electricity suppliers get paid to generate power for the grid. Until recently, you had the opportunity to choose a 100% green power option. Under this plan, clean power generators get the contract to supply the grid and receive payment from you. If everyone signed up for green power, clean power providers would have the money and the mandate to build new power plants (using renewable water, wind and solar energy), and dirty coal, nuclear, and natural gas power plants would be forced out of business. Now that the market in Maine is no longer offering a clean power option, using your vote in local elections may be the best strategy to clean up our power grid.
- Switch off the lights when you leave a room. There are more than 500,000 households in Maine. If every household in Maine happens to leave just one 100-watt light bulb turned on unnecessarily, that requires 50 MW of power -- which is more power than the entire Mars Hill wind farm produces. As we build wind farms and install solar panels to make the transition to clean power, let's be sure we're using it for something worthwhile!
- Hang dry your laundry. Do a load of laundry, set up a wooden drying rack by the wood stove, and dry your clothes without using a penny's worth of electricity. Even if you don't have a wood stove, clothes dry quickly indoors in winter because the relative humidity is low. When the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant was supplying our grid, its entire output (2,700 MW) would just about equal the demand if every household in Maine used an electric clothes dryer at the same time. Imagine that, we can dry our clothes with a nuclear power plant, or with the free energy already in our homes!
- Swap out disposable batteries for rechargeable ones. Each rechargeable battery can be recharged up to 1,000 times. Not only will you save money, but you'll also keep lots of unnecessary garbage out of our landfills and incinerators. And when your rechargeable battery no longer holds a charge, bring it to a proper recycling location. Here in Brunswick, Curtis Memorial Library is a convenient downtown location that accepts rechargeable batteries for recycling. Unfortunately, disposable batteries are not collected for recycling. Believe it or not, our local public works department recommends you throw disposable batteries in the trash -- there's no other way to dispose of them!
- Compost everything that rots, including paper waste. Have you ever seen a mound of one million paper towels? If you've ever been to your local landfill, like the one here in Brunswick, chances are you have. About 40% of the waste sent to landfills and incinerators in the United Sates is paper. It could all be sustainably used to build fertile soil in backyard composters. After all, paper was once part of a living thing; given the right opportunity it could live again. Facial tissue, paper napkins, and paper towels are often overlooked as compostables, but they are easy and safe to compost in backyard compost bins. If you are concerned about chemicals in the paper leaching into your soil, buy paper products with the Green Seal certification. Certified products use less toxic bleaching and dyeing methods. Or consider buying unbleached paper products. They are a little rougher (bleaching whitens and softens wood fibers) but a lot easier on the planet.
- Walk more. Simple things, like parking in the first spot you find instead of driving and idling an extra thirty seconds to find a spot closer to the door, really add up. There are almost 200 million registered drivers in the United States. If each of us shaved just one minute off our driving time each week, that totals almost 175 million hours of engine time per year. With an average fuel economy of about 25 miles per gallon, the average car in America burns about two gallons of fuel per hour. So everyone in the US resolved to drive one less minute per week, we could save 350 million gallons of gas per year. At $2 gallon that's only an extra $700 million dollars in our pockets. But if gas goes back to $4 per gallon that's $1.4 billion dollars per year. A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about some real money.
- Grow some of your own food. Probably the easiest place to start is with sprouts or salad greens. If you buy lettuce in the grocery store in winter in Maine, chances are good that it has traveled hundreds and perhaps thousands of miles to reach you. A large percentage of fresh greens sold in the Northeast in January are grown in California and Mexico. Assuming it costs you $1 per pound to ship things from California to Maine, you could send two heads of lettuce or 372,000 lettuce seeds. In other words, for $4 you could send eight heads of lettuce or you could send enough seeds to grow more than a million heads of lettuce -- enough for every single person in Maine. Beyond the cost savings, growing your own food is a great way to ensure you're eating fresh, healthy and organically-grown produce.
- Bring your own bag. Choosing paper bags ranks right up there with recycling as one of the "environmental myths" that curmudgeons delight in debunking. Try a web search for "paper or plastic" and you'll find hundreds of thousands of news articles and blog posts discussing the issue. The reason this question gets so much press is the ubiquity of bags in our modern lifestyle. According to one source, over 4 trillion (4,000,000,000,000) plastic bags are manufactured each year. Bags (or more precisely, small fragments of plastic bags) are now covering virtually the entire surface of our planet -- to the extent that ocean phytoplankton have to compete for sunlight with floating plastic detritus that won't break down for another 1,000 years. Americans are now using on average about 19 disposable bags per week -- about three every day. Here's an experiment to try at home: guess how many bags you use each week, then find out by saving every single disposable bag (both paper and plastic) over the course of seven days. Then try bringing your own bags -- little nylon stuff sacks are especially handy -- to see how few disposable bags you really need. Even those who scoff at the idea of recycling understand that reusing a bag to eliminate the need for a disposable bag really does make a difference. Even if each bag saved is just a penny earned, saving them all adds up to 40 billion dollars every year.
